Remember Your Story

I fell in love with healthcare while working as a radiology technician aide at a well-known imaging center in Dallas during college. I was working late one evening with one of our senior technicians, when I realized the profound opportunity a relationship between health care and technology could provide.

Typically evening shifts were quiet and uneventful, which made them a great shift for doing homework and planning out my life after graduation. On occasion, a shift would be sprinkled with a STAT order or two for patients at a nearby hospital. This evening proved to be one of those occasional shifts when a STAT order for an MRI scan was called in.

What was particularly interesting about this order was that it was for an abdomen and pelvic scan for a woman who was 8 months pregnant. (For those concerned, MRI scans do not use radiation like a CT or x-ray scan and are safe within the third trimester.) As you can imagine, the radiology technician scanned images not only detailing the mother’s injury, but as a by-product of the scanned location we were also given the most beautiful images of the infant.

As I sat there during my evening shift and watched the breathtaking images appear before me, I contemplated my own future in the industry that had provided me this opportunity. What direction should I pursue to make a difference for people like this mother? What will I accomplish during my career that will inspire another impressionable mind?

On that evening, I fell in love with health care technology and the opportunity uniquely available to us as health care professionals. Technology has enabled us to accomplish things that were unfathomable a century ago, whether that is providing an image of an unborn child or having an infrastructure that allows personal health information to be available wherever a patient decides to go for care. Using technology effectively, health care professionals have been able to save peoples’ lives, and families, because someone believed that technology would work one day, and they took the project in their own hands.

Each of us has a different story on how we fell in love with healthcare. For some it was a personal experience as a patient, for others it was a result of an opportunity to help someone in need. What is important though is to remember our story as we continue on in our careers. It is imperative that we do not forget why we are here and working on “this” project together, and what inspired us to get started on this journey in the first place.

Erica Olenski

Erica V. Olenski currently serves as an account executive at Corepoint Health. She has focused her research and professional experience in healthcare communications and new media opportunities within the healthcare IT industry.
Erica is a leader in the health IT social media community, serving as the VP of Communications for the HIMSS DFW Board of Directors for 2011-2012, and was the founder of the #HITsm (healthcare IT social media) tweet chat held each Friday at 11 a.m. CT. (For more information on the #HITsm chat, visit: http://ow.ly/536eu)
For updates on healthcare IT and social media, follow her on Twitter: @TheGr8Chalupa.

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Andy De (www.andyde.com)

It is a well known and incredibly shocking fact that inability to access vital, accurate and current health information especially in an emergency (usually an unforeseen event like a cardiac attack, stroke, seizure etc.) on time, leads to the loss of well over 80,000 lives in the United States alone!

I actually experienced this pain while helping my 72 year old father with his triple bypass surgery in India, in May of 2008.My father had a minor cardiac event while visiting us in the US a few years ago and was treated in a local Dallas hospital of repute and then discharged without any major intervention. He unfortunately forgot to secure copies of his health records before leaving this country. Having had a minor heart attack and being diagnosed with three clogged arteries that demanded a tripe bypass surgery, I needed to secure these records from his previous event for the cardiac surgeons in India.

Calling up the hospital in Dallas, sending them a written request from the doctor, having them dig up the relevant files and handing those off to my wife who then faxed them across to me in India, took all of 72 hours – and resulted in my father’s surgery being delayed by that length of time! Given his extremely precarious condition, this could have been potentially life threatening and could have been alleviated if I could have secured access to his health records on demand. Fortunately for us, my father’s surgery was very successful followed by a speedy recovery but the potentially devastating impact of not having right time access to his vital health information was an eye opening experience for me. I promised myself that this would never happen again as far as my health records and those of my family were concerned.

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#HITSM Chat

Moderated by Chad Johnson, @OchoTex, HealthStandards.com Editor and Corepoint Health Senior Marketing Manager. November 18th will be the last #HITsm chat under @HealthStandards. Celebrate ‘Passing the #HITsm torch’ to @techguy @HealthcareScene.

The first #HITsm tweet chat was held almost six years ago on Jan 10, 2011. Since that time, we have hosted approximately 280 #HITsm chats. While some of you may have participated in that very first chat (only 15 actually participated), I’m proud to say that the chats and the community have continued to grow […]

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